


Live and Wonder Why

by Snowfilly1



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Anxiety, Crowley Has Issues (Good Omens), Crowley is a Mess (Good Omens), Gen, Hurt Crowley, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Nanny Crowley (Good Omens), Nightmares, Suicidal Thoughts, The Dowling years, running out of time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:48:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25903849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snowfilly1/pseuds/Snowfilly1
Summary: "It takes Crowley three hours to decide he hates the Dowlings' place. Five hours to decide that he wants to leave, to run away. These are not the sort of humans he likes, or trusts, or feels safe around.  He gets as far as the end of the drive, fingers twisting in his hair.He could run.He turns back."The years of waiting for the end of the world take their toll on Crowley. A collection of unhappy vignettes from the Dowling years.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Crowley & Warlock Dowling
Comments: 19
Kudos: 43
Collections: Week 27: Nightmare





	Live and Wonder Why

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this last Christmas as a part fill for Drawlight's advent challenge and it was so horribly angsty I didn't want it ruining the rest of the collection, so it sat around until today's Ineffable Husbands FB group prompt 'nightmares.' Sorry guys. 
> 
> In addition to the tags, there is a scene with a minor injury and blood, and a scene with vomiting. This is not a happy fic; I don't really want to ruin anyone's day so please don't read if it's going to hurt too much.

Crowley doesn't mind the nightmares. They've been there since Eden; pain edged, sharp tooth things scrabbling through whatever peace he's managed to find, and he carries them like he carries the old fears, old scars - lightly, easily. They don't bother him. 

He has one the first night they spend at the Dowlings. Wakes curled around himself, fingers half turned to claws, pillow case torn. He can't remember what the nightmare was, only that it's left him cold and shivery. An ache of tension down his spine. 

It takes him three hours to decide he hates the place. Five hours to decide that he wants to leave, to run away. These are not the sort of humans he likes, or trusts, or feels safe around. He gets as far as the end of the drive, fingers twisting in his hair. 

He could run. 

He turns back. (Aziraphale will say later that he never saw Crowley smile properly again after that day, and Crowley will admit to himself it's true, that he lost something in the white walls and the flashy gardens of the Dowlings' mansion and never found it.)

Freedom, maybe. Hope. 

He walks back into the house. 

Warlock is a baby. 

**

Nanny tells Warlock about dreams and soothes him through a bad one. Settles a blanket around him. Turns on a light. It's not starlight, but he remembers the heat of them as he kindles it.

Crowley screams in his sleep, and only knows that because he wakes up shivering, throat raw. No-one comes. He sleeps with the lights off. He knows it doesn't make a difference. 

'You'll dream about whatever you like best,' Aziraphale promises a hundred times over, dragging his fingers across the drowsy toddler's head. Crowley watches. Wants. No-one ever asks what a demon might dream about. 

(The Fall would be too easy. It's always the Fall; there's only so many ways his mind can turn shattered glass memories into anything coherent. There is pain and there is Falling and he's known this dream since he wore a different name; it holds no terrors anymore.)

He tells himself that when he wakens, sweat damp. There are no tears in his eyes. It was too long ago to hurt.

Aziraphale asks him, once. 'I heard you last night. You were...'

Crowley bites the answer off between too sharp teeth. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

They've never been so close together for so long. Aziraphale isn't normally around him when he's sleeping. Crowley gathers his secrets, wraps them as a cloak around himself. 

(Angel, I'm scared.) 

Tries to sleep, a dark and broken shape against the whiteness of bed sheets he has to let someone else change. There is no room for miracles here, he knows. 

Warlock is two.

Is three. 

Four. 

***

Time chokes him. Warlock brings home a calendar he made in school, sticky white pages glued haphazardly to a sheet of green paper. It smells of cheap ink and Pritstick and terror. Warlock is five. 

Crowley thumbs through it, flicking the dates until they blur, until the paper slices his hand. Blood runs down the list of days. 

That's how it's going to end. Him and Aziraphale and blood and however many days they have left. He counts them, a starving man counting out food as though longing could change it. This many days and seasons and changes of the moon are all they have left. 

***

Crowley dies in a nightmare. He's heard humans that die in their dreams die in reality. Demons live, and wonder why. 

He wonders about it as he settles Warlock down, as he makes him dinner. Chats with Aziraphale in the garden and paints his face into a smile and says 'yes, of course, I'm alright.'

There are options. Quick ones, clean ones, ones that end a human. He's used them enough times after all; in mercy and love and under orders. They won't quite work on demons. 

(Warlock's school has a chapel in it. They have a font of Holy Water there. Crowley didn't find that out for any particular reason.)

It would leave Aziraphale alone. 

It would leave Aziraphale safe. 

'You looked like you were having a nice dream, dear boy,' Aziraphale says one morning when Crowley's so tired he hadn't realised he'd fallen asleep on the grass, and he can't say 'I dreamt it was all over and I didn't have to run any more.'

'It was a nice dream,' he mutters, and it's true. So true. He doesn't want to keep fighting like this. 

Warlock is six.

****

Warlock is seven, and Crowley is drunk and getting drunker. Yesterday's birthday boy is playing on his new computer and Crowley is down two bottles of wine and most of a bottle of rum. Sometimes, there's a level he can find, when Aziraphale isn't around to watch him; a balance between feeling and unconsciousness where the alcohol slows his brain down just enough that he isn't afraid. 

Tonight, he ends up on his knees, throwing up until his stomach aches and his throat screams but for once, not because he is, and he wants to leave all of this behind. 

Afterwards, a long time afterwards, there are no dreams. Not that night. It's a half way step to something. 

Crowley does it again. 

Remembers something one day about whiskey being called holy water, and laughs and drinks and it feels like it's burning him to death anyway. And isn't that a blessing. 

***  
Sleeping tablets work on demons. That's his discovery when Warlock is eight. 

Hazy dreams, fever edged ones, that don't make any sense. Warlock begging not to die. Aziraphale begging him for something. 

Crowley doesn't beg any more. He's learnt not to ask for answers. Why would anyone waste them on a demon?

He just dreams, and they cling to him; cobwebby, haunting, even by daylight. He sees Aziraphale in his dreams and doesn't let go. They're running out of time. 

***  
Warlock is nine. Crowley brings a flask from Mayfair to the Dowlings'. He holds it sometimes and dreams. 

***

Warlock is ten. 

'Are you alright?' Aziraphale asks one day. 

Time keeps doing its thing. He's making a list of last times. The last times he'll see trees shading gold and red to autumn, the last time he'll he see swallows curving in a blue sky; the last time, the last time, the last time. 

'Of course, ' Crowley says. The words tumble from his lips. 

Warlock is ten and a half. 

'Are you sure?'

'Yes, I'm fine.'

There'll be a last time he sees Aziraphale.

Warlock is ten and eleven months. 

Crowley is drunk again. Crowley is swallowing the tablets. Crowley is checking the route to the school.

No, Crowley doesn't mind the nightmares. They beat the fuck out of waking up.

**Author's Note:**

> 'Warlock is five...' Comes from a Harlan Ellison short story, Jeffry is Five. 
> 
> 'Demons live and wonder why' is from Glenn Cook's Black Company novels, one of which is called Soldiers Live. The full saying is Soldiers live and wonder why. 
> 
> I wrote it around Christmas time, and Tears for Fears' Mad World was playing a lot. 'The dreams in which I'm dying / are the best I've ever had' is a lyric that filtered through into this one. 
> 
> Any and all comments welcome.


End file.
